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Today I’ve released uPod 1.4. Thanks to Daniel Pluta the latest release brings a Polish translation. Further on it provides new synchronization settings which give you the possibility to better control the sync to — for example — reduce mobile data usage. One of the new options allows you to restrict the sync to Wi-FI connections.

It was exactly on March 31 2013 where I’ve announced uPod on Twitter and Google+ and committed the first lines of code. In October 2013 the beta phase started and sice January 1 2014 uPod is available at Google play.

This morning I’ve published a minor release which brings German language support to the uPod UI. So if you’ve setup German as your primary language in the Android settings, uPod will present you a German user interface. Many thanks to Philip Olbrich and the other translators for their great job.

I now want to start to promote uPod through well known Android blogs and sites. Therefore it is important to have good ratings at Google play! Unfortunately until now uPod has only a little number (26) of ratings which makes the few 1 to 3 star ratings look more important than I think they are.

Until today uPod is only available in English language. I have received a lot of requests to translate uPod into other languages. This is something where I am depended on the help from the community — from you! So if you want to make uPod even better and are willing to invest some time, you can do so now: Simply go to the uPod translation page at Crowdin and start to translate.

Based on uPod’s current user statistics I have activated French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish for translation. If you are missing your favorite language please contact me.

I estimate that a complete translation requires about four hours. But Crowdin is a community based translation service, so every translated string helps!

Until now after installation uPod was an empty space. You needed to manually add podcasts by URL or by importing OPMLs. This is a high barrier for users trying out podcasts for the first time or even for those who know everything about podcasts but just want to quickly tryout uPod as an alternative to their current podcast player.

Version 1.2 — which is currently in beta phase — fixes this problem by providing some new podcast discovery features: You can now browse popular podcasts by category or search for podcasts. Both features require you to select your preferred podcast language(s), so that they can provide relevant results for you.

The tablet screenshot below shows the popular podcast list. To narrow the results you can pick a category by tapping the view’s title in the upper left.

The phone screenshot shows the podcast search results. Simply enter one or more search terms and they will be matched against the podcast titles, keywords, descriptions and authors. So if you know a part of the name of your favorite podcast simply enter it and easily subscribe to it. Or do you want to see a list of all podcasts created by your favorite podcaster? No problem.

As mentioned above this feature was intended for new users, but in the end I was surprised how many interesting new podcasts I have found this way. So give it a try.

Version 1.1 has passed the beta phase. Though the version number indicates a smaller update, indeed this is a big one. It’s main purpose is to implement the new workflow as described in the related blog post.

In short: For each episode a “New”-state is now tracked. New episodes are shown with bold font like in an e-mail client. New episodes appear in the “New”-section and — if you want — also everywhere in your library where they naturally belong to. The old “Inbox”-section has been removed.

Further on uPod can now add new episodes automatically to the end of your playlist if you wish it to — this is possible either for all new episodes or you can configure this on a per-subscription basis.

As a bigger visual change you may notice, that uPod now uses a new font for episode and podcast titles on Jelly Bean and above. This condensed font is much smaller and provides better readability for the titles and doesn’t occupy as much space as before.

But the new version also brings a lot more. Here is the full list of changes: